by Ken McNab
‘I wasn’t much older than The Beatles. I was born in 1938, so I was two years younger than John Lennon. It wasn’t unusual for me to be at Abbey Road. I had been there on numerous occasions. I used to see them having a cup of tea in the canteen. We used to sometimes be at the next table and they would come in. We used to just say a casual hello to them, that kind of thing.’
Seagrove went on: ‘On this particular day we saw them all walking out the front door together around about ten or so, which was a bit unusual in itself. You rarely saw them at that time of day. We knew something was going on. I suppose curiosity got the better of us so we followed them. We stopped at the gate and they walked up the other end. We just stood there and watched what they were doing.
‘The guy who was taking the photograph was up on a very tall pair of steps and he was actually waving to us to get out of the way. But we decided to just stand our ground. He was waving his arms and shouting at us but we refused to budge, being a bit young and a bit bolshie, I suppose. We had no idea about the significance of the picture. We didn’t know what it was for. Of course, later on I wish I had been able to get them to sign a copy of the album but by the time the album came out they were never seen again in public and you certainly didn’t see them at the EMI Studios. It would have been worth a fortune. If the picture had been taken today we would probably have been airbrushed out of it and airbrushed out of history as well.’
Another eyewitness was John Kosh, a highly rated young designer recently appointed at Lennon’s behest as Apple’s creative director – and someone whose arrival went against Klein’s cost-cutting grain. He has his own recollections of the photograph that would come to provide a lasting image of The Beatles.
He said, ‘The thing was, as far as I can recall, the pictures were only supposed to be publicity shots. They were never intended for an album cover, no matter what Paul McCartney says. It changed into an album cover when EMI saw the shots and decided they wanted an album cover by, say, Wednesday and this was Monday, something like that.
‘That same evening we had the pictures rush-processed. We put them on the lightbox and went through them one by one. And it seemed to me that the one we chose was the most obvious one. They were all supposed to be in step but of course they’re not. It took about twenty minutes for people to decide that it went from publicity shots to an album cover. We were poring over the pictures when we got a note from EMI saying they needed an album cover fast.
‘I had been working on Let It Be, which of course was supposed to come out first. Then the lads had got together again and did such a fantastic job that everyone knew this record would have to come out before Let It Be. So that then was the trigger for everyone running about like blue-arsed flies.
‘It was my decision not to have the word “Beatles” on the cover, which caused me all kinds of trouble. It occurred to me that anyone who didn’t know who these four guys are must have been living in a cave or something. They were the four most famous musicians on the planet. They didn’t need the name of the band on the album. So we did not put the name “Beatles” on the cover which, looking back, was pretty radical for a twenty-three-year-old.
‘But in all honesty I was scared stiff. And then Sir Joseph Lockwood, who was the chairman of EMI, phoned me at 3 a.m. He said I would cost them thousands of sales by not having the name of the band on the cover.
‘He was absolutely livid, furious. I was still half-asleep but when someone like that is raging down the phone at you, you wake up pretty quick. To be honest, I was shocked, not so much by the phone call as the language. He had this upper-class English accent and he was calling me a fucking prick. The reason he phoned me at three in the morning was he had just found out the cover had gone to press.
‘So I went into Apple the next day scared stiff and the first person I saw was George Harrison and I told him about the phone call and that Sir Joseph Lockwood was after my blood. He just said, “Fuck it, man, we’re The Beatles.”
‘In the end, the album has sold something like twenty-six million copies or something ridiculous like that, so I feel fairly vindicated. But at the time I was very nervous and very worried. You really did have to hold on to your sphincter. Sir Joseph Lockwood was a very powerful force in the music industry and had been for a long time. He was a man used to getting his own way.’
While Kosh fretted about appeasing music-industry aristocracy, Kevin Harrington was at the beck and call of rock ’n’ roll royalty. As an assistant to Mal Evans, The Beatles’ faithful gofer-in-chief, Harrington had already enjoyed a box-office seat at the rooftop concert back in January. Now here he was witnessing another epochal moment. But Harrington is adamant that the photo session was not as spontaneous as history has depicted it.
He recalled: ‘The actual picture was taken on a Friday but the previous Sunday I was asked to go to EMI Studios. I didn’t know what it was until I turned up with Steve Brendell [another assistant] and saw Iain MacMillan the photographer. We normally had Sundays off but I was happy to do anything for the band.
‘Iain said he needed four people to walk across the Zebra crossing. So we went into the studios and grabbed a couple of porters. And we then spent twenty minutes or so walking back and forwards across the Zebra crossing. Iain seemed to have a drawing in his hand about how it was supposed to look, at least that’s what I remember. The drill was that Iain wanted four guys just to act out how it would look in the picture. It was really just a mock-up for Iain to show the band how it would look. I know a photo exists of the four of us but I am not in a position to publish it.
‘When you worked for The Beatles anything could happen. Nothing was strange. We might have guessed it was for an album picture but I’m not one hundred per cent sure, but I was there on the Friday when they shot the picture for real. The thing was that the London traffic in those days was virtually non-existent. There was hardly any traffic going down Abbey Road except for the occasional bus or taxi. A policeman came along and he stopped whatever traffic there was. The whole thing lasted about twenty minutes. I think Iain was happy with what he had but The Beatles didn’t like to hang around much. They always wanted things done pretty quickly.’
MacMillan himself remained largely tight-lipped about the picture that, in many ways, became the defining image of The Beatles in their final days as a band. He rarely talked about it, breaking cover only a few times to reference his famous shot. He was quoted in the Guardian in August 1989 as saying: ‘That photo’s been called an icon of the Sixties. I suppose it is. I think the reason it became so popular is its simplicity. It’s a very simple, stylised shot. Also it’s a shot people can relate to. It’s a place where people can still walk.
‘The whole idea, I must say, was Paul McCartney’s. A few days before the shoot, he drew a sketch of how he imagined the cover, which we executed almost exactly that day. I took a couple of shots of The Beatles crossing Abbey Road one way. We let some of the traffic go by and then they walked across the road the other way, and I took a few more shots. The one eventually chosen for the cover was number five of six. It was the only one that had their legs in a perfect ‘V’ formation, which is what I wanted stylistically.’
By 10.30 a.m., the shoot was over. The Beatles had time to kill for a few hours before they were due back at the session to continue work on ‘The End’, ‘I Want You’ and ‘Oh! Darling’. Harrison and Evans headed off to London Zoo, Starr went shopping, while Lennon and McCartney, along with Linda, headed back to Paul’s nearby house for lunch.
Almost at the same time, four members of a notorious Los Angeles hippie family, led by a charismatic drifter named Charles Manson, were making plans to invade the home of American actress Sharon Tate, the wife of Hollywood film director Roman Polanski. Some eighteen hours later, Tate, who was eight months pregnant, lay dead in a pool of blood alongside her former lover Jay Sebring, friend Stephen Parent, screenwriter Wojciech Frykowski and Frykowski’s girlfriend Abigail Folger, heiress to the Folger coffee fortune.<
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Worldwide revulsion greeted the murderous rampage, which Manson claimed had been carried out under the flag of a race war he’d named ‘Helter Skelter’, one of the tracks on the White Album. By the time he and his followers were hauled before the courts, The Beatles would be further linked to one of the most heinous crimes of the decade.
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As the days ticked down, all the jigsaw pieces were slotting together. Agreement had been reached on a decision to call the album Abbey Road, and a potential cover picture was in the can. Now all they needed was to maintain their fragile unity – eyewitnesses still talked about tightrope tensions and occasional walkouts – to finish the work in the studio that had been launched on 1 July.
Throughout the next week, they continued to pick up the pace. Playbacks revealed that most of the songs were in good order, requiring only overdubs and additional instrumental tweaks to bring them up to scratch. Over the next twelve days they all answered the call of duty to finesse the tracks, each of them privately aware that the songs – most of them, at least – were better than they had any reason to expect. Checking the list of tracks that had already been recorded, Lennon, fearing that McCartney was again the dominant voice on the album, was keen to re-animate ‘I Want You’, his searing love song to Yoko.
He had first aired the track at Twickenham in February and had made another pass at it in April. Up to now, he had used the newly commandeered Moog synthesiser sparingly, only employing its distinctive textures to give ‘Because’ a gossamer tinge. Normally, he much preferred to compose on the piano or guitar. He was, nevertheless intrigued by the instrument’s potential to create soundscapes which went against the musical grain. As such, it opened up the possibility of blending rock structures with his new Yoko-inspired passion for all things avant-garde. ‘I Want You’ was the obvious choice for an intermarriage between two contrasting musical styles.
On 8 August, hours after waving MacMillan off to develop his photographs, Lennon enlisted Harrison’s help to twiddle the Moog sufficiently to generate the wall of white noise that would eventually dominate the song’s marathon fadeout. Later in the month, Starr, of all people, would liberate a wind machine from an EMI cupboard to distort the background even more.
On 11 August, together with McCartney and Harrison, Lennon added harmony vocals by repeating the one line, ‘she’s so heavy’, to the track recorded on 18 April at Trident Studios, leaving him with two distinct versions and, typically, unsure as to which one he liked better. It was at this session that he decided to officially add ‘She’s So Heavy’, in parenthesis, to the title. (‘Heavy’ was the buzzword of the times and was also McCartney’s favourite adjective to describe the miserable vibe that he believed Klein had brought to Apple.)
Lennon would continue to wrestle with the dilemma over the two versions for another nine days. The fourteenth of August saw a marathon session aimed largely at fusing together all the dissonant fragments of the medley into one collective whole, using crossfades and loop effects to give the impression of a single, cohesive track. The medley was mainly a Lennon-McCartney production, but Harrison played a huge part with some of his most inspired and understated guitar work.
He said, ‘During the album things got a bit more positive and, although it had some overdubs, we got to play the whole medley. We put them in order, played the backing track and recorded it all in one take, going from one arrangement to the next. We did actually perform more like musicians again.
‘Likewise with the vocal tracks: we had to rehearse a lot of harmonies and learn all the back-up parts. Some songs are good with just one voice and then harmonies coming in at different places and sometimes three-part work. It’s just embellishment, really, and I suppose we made up parts where we thought it fitted because we were all trying to be singers then.’
George Martin’s return to the fold also meant reinstating the production values which had always been so important in helping to burnish their raw material into high-end merchandise. A (silent) musical collaborator, Martin, with his intuitive grasp for what worked, was equally comfortable working with single musicians as he was conducting a huge orchestra to add a grand and sweeping backdrop to even the most mundane material.
Several songs were obvious candidates for orchestration – the fusion of ‘Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight’, ‘The End’ and the two Harrison songs - ‘Something’ and ‘Here Comes The Sun’ – that already stood out. This was the first time that any of Harrison’s work had been given any symphonic treatment by Martin.
On Friday, 15 August, Harrison finally took centre stage amid a line-up that, according to Mark Lewisohn’s The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions, included twelve violins, four violas, four cellos, a string bass, four horns, three trumpets, one trombone and one bass trombone. All the hired musicians were on a very expensive clock but Sir Joseph Lockwood had long ago decided that The Beatles should be given a wide economic latitude because of their importance to his company’s bottom line.
A problem, however, quickly arose with ‘Something’; Harrison was unhappy with the lead guitar line he had laid down during an earlier session. But even allowing for the fact that The Beatles were now using eight tracks for the first time, there wasn’t enough space to redo it separately as an overdub. So he took the plucky decision to re-record his lead part live with the orchestra.
It said much for his newly emboldened state of mind that he felt confident enough to pull it off alongside the cream of London’s top classically trained musicians. He betrayed no sign of nerves as he effortlessly nailed the solo, one of the most elegant he ever committed to record.
Watching through the cracks in their fingers upstairs were Martin and Emerick, neither of whom was confident that Harrison could do it without several expensive – and embarrassing – retakes. But their concerns were quickly set aside.
‘He actually did it live with the orchestra,’ recalled Emerick. ‘It was almost the same solo [as before] – note for note. The only reason I feel he wanted to redo it was emotion.’
During two more sessions, on 18 and 19 August, the finishing touches were added to ‘Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight’, and a piano track was tacked on to ‘The End’, while Harrison added the distinctive Moog track that gave ‘Here Comes The Sun’ a bit more sonic punch.
By now, the finishing line seemed near. Only two serious outstanding issues remained. The first one was the nagging puzzle that was ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’; the second one was accommodating Lennon’s reservations over the running order. Both matters were resolved once and for all at the session on Wednesday, 20 August.
The first four hours were spent revisiting ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’, which by now had become the most convoluted recording in the band’s career, having undergone a number of reworkings since its first public airing in February. By mid-August there were two distinct versions. The first three minutes of the version recorded at Trident contained all the vocals and also included a beautiful, swirling organ track played by Billy Preston; the second part done at Abbey Road included the recently added three-part harmonies overlaid on a monstrous blues riff repeated over and over. The solution was obvious: remix both versions and then edit them together to create one master track. It clocked in at seven minutes and forty-seven seconds, outpacing ‘Hey Jude’ as the longest track they ever committed to tape.
The song fused elements of hard rock, blues, bossa nova and even jazz to form a piece of music that proved The Beatles could create anarchic rock just as efficiently as any of their late Sixties contemporaries. It was the sound of a post-apocalyptic nightmare set to music and was the most radical rock track they ever recorded.
Happy at last with the new mix, Lennon had nevertheless one further, unorthodox demand to make of Emerick as they listened to the newly edited playback. With the tape almost running out, and Lennon demanding the swirling climax sound louder and louder in the fadeout, he told Emerick to suddenly splice the tape with scissors to create a j
arring, slashing ending.
Gut instinct told the engineer this was crazy, but he nevertheless complied and the song came crashing to a cliff-edge, full stop. ‘I thought the song was going to have a fadeout,’ he recalled. ‘But suddenly John told me, “Cut the tape.” I was apprehensive at first – we’d never done anything like that. “Cut the tape?” But he was insistent, and he wound up being right.’
It was the last song that all four collectively worked on under The Beatles’ banner, and irony was not hard to find. The track was an undisguised love song to Yoko, the woman who history would unfairly blame most for driving a wedge between Lennon and his bandmates and ultimately causing the group to split.
The rest of the session was devoted to agreeing a running order for the album and finding common ground over the sequencing of the tracks. After the first listen, ‘Oh! Darling’ and ‘Octopus’s Garden’ were transposed.
Up to then, Lennon believed he had won the argument with McCartney especially for ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’ to be the last track on the album, and possibly, just possibly, the final song on any Beatle album, giving Lennon what he was always used to getting – the last word.
Even at this late hour – it was almost midnight – he was still lobbying for all his songs to be on one side and all McCartney’s on the other. He still remained unconvinced over the merits of the medley, which at this point was earmarked for side one. But the truth was they had come too far down the road to start backtracking now.
Boxed into a corner, and with McCartney and Martin blocking all the exits, Lennon reluctantly gave way and the running order was flipped, leaving ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’ as the final track on side one and ‘The End’ appropriately bringing the curtain down on side two (apart from one, final secret surprise).
